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New software release

Submitted by DIYouware on Sun, 12/27/2015 - 21:57

We have been working during Christmas vacations to finish the new release of the software. We modified all the software tool chain to include new functionality, adapt the software to new library versions and fix some bugs.

These are the changes:

TwinTeeth Firmware V2.1

New functionality to fire the laser using Z or E axis.

New G81 command for drilling and filling blind vias.

Minor changes on rastering laser printing.

TwinTeehMC 2.3

Refactoring and new Processing version support

We refactored the server side software to re-write some code and also support new versions of Processing and ControlIP5.

Now we support the following versions:

Processing 3.0

ControlIP5 2.2.5

ghost4j-0.5.1.

GhostScript 9.16

New 0.05mm option added to the Jog keypad

When you click on the arrows at the KeyPad sides, you manually move the platform the millimetres shown on the top-left corner of the pad. If you click there you will see that you can change that number to 0.1,1 and 10mm. In this new version we also add 0.05mm to provides you more precision manually moving the platform.

New Laser plotting and 3D functionality

We added new functionality to the Laser Toolhead tab to allow different ways of printing with the laser.

Last version only supported laser rastering printing. This method has a high resolution because it prints bitmaps at 600dpi, in a similar way a paper printer does, but sometimes it can be time consuming. For this reason we included in this new version the possibility to use the laser for plotting boards. You can use this option to print circuit traces using negative film/boards or to quickly isolate the traces using positive film/boards. It works using the Z axis as the trigger to fire the laser. When the Z axis moves below zero position the firmware fires the laser. When it moves up under zero it turns the laser off. Activate this mode is easy: just push the Plot button, load a valid g-code or HPGL file, focus the laser pushing on the Focus button and run the program. Note that the laser will focus only one time at the centre of the board and not four times on the corners like rastering mode does.

The second method is based on the movement of the E axis and is experimental. We used it to 3D print objects with the laser on UV resin. It consists on fire the laser when the E axis moves. The E axis is the plastic extruder axis of 3D printers. The g-code generated by the slicer programs moves the e-axis when the extruder has to deposit some plastic on the object. Instead of that, we fire the laser to cure the resin. You can use any g-code file generated by 3D printing software like Cura or Slic3R. Just push the 3D button on the Laser ToolHead tab, load a valid 3D g-code file, focus the laser and run the program.

Basically we added two new fields for setting in mm the x and y board offsets from coordinates origin. In this way you can use whatever coordinate origin while designing the board, even not centred on it, because later you can compensate it adding offsets on TwinTeethMC.

The procedure to use this new feature is the following:

Design the board and put the x,y origin at the left-bottom corner of the board (Eagle’s default)